Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

pixie.town statistics:

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​ one little gnome running through the internet pipes delivering all the toots

Unidentified Flying Borb

I'm absolutely losing it

Here's the kicker. It's not that Galactica picked the wrong law. It is that the Padua economist to whom Galactica attributes the law, Gianni Brandolini, DOES NOT EXIST.

Galactica's phrasing of the law itself? That does not exist either. No one has ever said that phrase online (rather a surprise, tbh).

Galactica doesn't let us "access and manipulate what we know about the universe." It generates *pure bullshit* — which, incidentally, will be orders of magnitude more difficult to clean up.

Let's take a look. Galactica can generate wikipedia articles, supposedly.

So let's see what they look like. Here's one for Brandolini's law, the principle that bullshit takes another of magnitude less effort create than to clean up.

Left: Galactica's attempt at creating a wikipedia entry
https://galactica.org/?prompt=wiki+article+on+brandolini%27s+law

Right: The actual wikipedia entry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

I've figured out what pisses me off so much about Facebook's Galactica demo.

It's not because people can use to to write bad essays for their homework. There are plenty of large language models that can do that. It's because Facebook is presenting it as something that it most definitely is not.

Facebook is selling it as a knowledge engine, a "new interface to access and manipulate what we know about the universe."

Actually it's just a random bullshit generator.

http://galactica.org

Please take a moment to drink in the absolute spectacle that is the Brands.town instance: https://brands.town/explore

TIL that Atari had an in-house FIG #Forth variant called Coin-Op Forth and that it has, in fact, leaked onto the internet, along with the manual. #retrogamedev

https://archive.org/details/AtariCoinOpFORTHAndSwarthmoreExtensions/page/n3/mode/2up

@aras what if we changed the "Publish!" button to be the "🚢" button :O

Worst. CAPCHA. Ever.

Donderdag 1 december (19:00) organiseren we samen met @publicspaces een avond over het federatieve #internet en #Mastodon. (#fediverse) Wil je overstappen, een eigen instance runnen of leren van anderen? Kom langs! Toegang is gratis.

https://waag.org/nl/event/mastodon-en-het-federatieve-internet/

to be fair: the "EA" movement is three or four movements in a trenchcoat. some do good stuff, others are rationalist AI cultists.

EAs are desperately sincere, and they probably make more good things happen than would happen otherwise

but they need to get rid of the AI cultists

who are also the Longtermists, who literally care more about 10^54 hypothetical future human emulations running on computers than about real people who exist now, and who care more about the possible suffering of electrons than the real suffering caused by climate change or racism

and the FTX-Alameda crew were hardcore from the AI cultist wing of EA

it's systemic, because the AI cultists named it "Effective Altruism" and gathered the others into the trenchcoat, and still do a lot of the organisational slog, so it's hard to get free of them.

This FTX catastrophe offers a chance: so many EA initiatives got screwed over too.

how to infuriate an EA: point out that the Make A Wish Foundation is literally a more efficient use of charitable dollars than MIRI, the AI cultists' charity

take care not to let EAs ambit-claim the concept of charity, or the concept of measuring charity, which even the good ones have a nasty habit of trying

You may have heard that the principals of the collapsed FTX crypto exchange were into Effective Altruism.

Let me explain what Effective Altruism is:

* Some charities are more effective than others, and you should donate to the more effective ones.

yeah, sounds obvious and sensible

* As a first-worlder, you are basically rich, even if you don’t feel like it, and you therefore have an ethical obligation to contribute to those who aren’t - almost certainly more than you do now.

this is pretty sound reasoning actually, I can get behind this

* Therefore, we can and should stack-rank every charitable initiative in the world according to an objective numerical scoring system,

wait what

* and clearly the most cost-effective initiative possible for all of humanity is donating to fight the prospect of unfriendly artificial intelligence,,

what the

* and oh look, we just happen to have a charity for that precise purpose right here! WHAT ARE THE ODDS,,,,

fuckin

#fediTips this is a very neurodivergent space! If you're not gonna have patience with people being openly neurodivergent, this probably isn't the best place for you
I've gotten very used to having actual nuanced discussions and ngl I am not a fan of suddenly being treated like I was on Twitter again
If all you do in convos is try to find fault, we're not gonna get along